36 Fun Facts About Campbell's Soup Cans

How did Warhol spend his first soup can show's opening night?

Staying away in New York, he left the opening to others; he made the trip a year later, when the same gallery filled its front room with his pictures of Elvis.

In which city were the Campbell's Soup Cans first exhibited, in July 1962?

Los Angeles got the show because a dealer there offered him one when no New York gallery would take him on.

What was the name of the gallery that first showed Warhol's soup cans in 1962?

Ferus got the show because its director, visiting Warhol's studio that spring, watched him at work on the cans and offered him the gallery.

Which art dealer kept the original 32 canvases together as a set and eventually helped MoMA acquire them?

Irving Blum talked the first buyers into giving up their canvases, then kept the set at home for 25 years, sometimes hanging it in his dining room.

How were the 32 canvases displayed at their 1962 debut?

In a row on a shelf, like groceries in a store: each canvas rested on a narrow ledge, a layout MoMA copied in 2015 when it first showed them in a single line.

How did Warhol's dealer pay the $1,000 he owed for all 32 canvases?

In ten instalments of $100 a month, which came to $31.25 a painting, less than a third of the price he had been asking for each one in the gallery.

Which actor bought a soup can painting in 1962, then gave it up so the set could stay together?

Dennis Hopper reserved the Tomato can before the show had even opened, the first of only a handful of buyers, all of whom the dealer later talked out of their purchases.

How did a rival gallery mock the first soup can show?

Stacked real cans in its window, under a sign that read 'Get the original. Our low price: two for 33 cents', was the neighbours' joke; only a handful of the canvases sold.

What happened within a day of the soup can exhibition closing on 4 August 1962?

Marilyn Monroe died within hours of the show closing, and inside a few weeks Warhol was at work on the first of his Marilyns, trading groceries for celebrity.

Contrary to popular belief, how were the original 32 canvases made?

Painted by hand over a pencil underdrawing, with the lettering projected onto each canvas and traced, which is why no two of the 32 are quite alike.

What detail on each can did Warhol apply with a rubber stamp?

The gold fleur-de-lis row at the foot of each can came from a stamp he cut out of a rubber eraser, which is why the imprints differ a little from canvas to canvas.

What did Campbell's consider doing when the soup can paintings first went on show?

Taking Warhol to court was discussed after its lawyers looked at the show, but the company chose to wait and see how the public reacted, and it never sued.

What advice did Muriel Latow reputedly sell Warhol for $50?

Paint what everyone sees every day, 'like a can of Campbell's soup', was her tip in the usual telling; she is also said to have told him to paint money, which he did.

Asked why he painted soup cans, Warhol said he had eaten the same what every day for twenty years?

Lunch, 'the same thing over and over again', was his deadpan reply; the soup was usually heated up by his mother, who had moved to New York to live with him.

What did a Campbell's marketing manager send Warhol in 1964 along with an admiring letter?

Cases of tomato soup were not the end of it: the company also commissioned a soup can picture from him, as a leaving present for its retiring chairman.

What inspired the red-and-white Campbell's label of 1898 that Warhol later immortalised?

Herberton Williams, a Campbell's executive, admired the Cornell football team's red-and-white uniforms at a game in 1898; the label adopted the colours that year and added a Paris Exposition gold medal in 1900.

Which 1897 invention by a Campbell's chemist made the company's fortune?

Condensed soup was the idea of the company president's nephew, a young chemist who had only just joined; by 1914 he was running the firm himself.

Which soup, a dish tied to Philadelphia, is on the torn-label Warhol can sold for $11.8 million in 2006?

Pepper Pot was a flavour he came back to: in 1961, before the famous set, he had painted a Pepper Pot can as a present for his brother Paul.

What object appears beside the can in the first of Warhol's soup can paintings to hang in a museum?

A can opener bites into the lid in one of the first and biggest cans he painted; collectors bought it at once and lent it to a Connecticut museum show that same summer.

Asked about his soup can paintings by a curator, what kind of pictures did Warhol say they were?

Portraits was his answer, given with 'a funny smile' to the curator Walter Hopps, and MoMA notes that he always spoke of the cans that way.

What did Warhol change for his set of twenty larger soup can canvases in 1965?

The label's colours ran wild: he cut the 32 varieties down to tomato alone and gave it combinations such as blue and purple or orange and green.

Warhol reissued the soup cans in 1968 and 1969 as portfolios of prints made by which method?

Silkscreen, his signature method by then, let him issue each portfolio of ten cans in an edition of 250, so many museums own the prints while MoMA alone has the paintings.

What disclaimer did Warhol write on some unauthorised Belgian reprints of his 1960s prints?

'This is not by me' was his riposte after he fell out with partners to whom he had already handed his negatives and colour codes; their reprints, soup cans among them, are stamped Sunday B. Morning.

Warhol turned to soup cans after which painter beat him to pictures based on comic strips?

Roy Lichtenstein 'did it so much better', Warhol admitted, and a leading New York dealer had turned him down because the two men's comic paintings looked too alike.

Which collector, whose California museum now holds it, paid $11.8 million for a torn-label soup can in 2006?

Eli Broad's price was then a record for any soup can painting, and the seller was the dealer who had struggled in 1962 to find buyers for the cans at $100 each.

MoMA paid about how much in 1996 for 32 canvases that had cost their owner $1,000?

About $15 million, part sale and part gift, which put each canvas at nearly half a million dollars against the $31.25 it had cost him.

Where did the 32 canvases hang on long-term loan before MoMA acquired them in 1996?

The National Gallery of Art in Washington took them in 1987; their owner was getting them ready to travel there in the very week that Warhol died.

What was the Souper Dress, which Campbell's sold in 1967 for $1 and two soup labels, made of?

Paper was the point: the dress was a throwaway, printed all over with rows of soup cans, and was the company's own cheerful nod to Warhol's paintings.

In 2012 Campbell's sold Warhol-inspired tomato soup cans through which US retailer?

Target sold 1.2 million of the cans at 75 cents each, in labels that carried Warhol sayings such as his line about everybody being world-famous for fifteen minutes.

In which animated sitcom does Warhol throw soup cans at the main character in a 1999 episode?

The Simpsons put Warhol in Homer's nightmare after Homer becomes an accidental 'outsider artist': figures from great works of art take turns attacking him, and Warhol's weapon is soup.

Which 1964 New York gallery show set out Pop art, Warhol's soup cans included, like goods in a shop?

The American Supermarket turned the Bianchini Gallery into a mock store where art was stocked and sold like groceries, from wax meats to printed shopping bags, with a Warhol soup can on the wall.

Which news magazine showed Warhol's soup cans to the country in May 1962, two months before their first exhibition?

Time ran a photograph of his studio in its piece on the new Pop painters, quoting him: 'I just paint things I always thought were beautiful.'

What happened to seven Campbell's Soup I prints at a Missouri art museum in April 2016?

Stolen in an overnight break-in at the Springfield Art Museum: the thieves left three of the set of ten behind, and the FBI offered a $25,000 reward.

What did climate protesters do to a set of Campbell's Soup I prints in Canberra in November 2022?

Glued themselves to it, after scrawling across the frames in blue marker; the prints sat behind glass and were unharmed. Weeks earlier, activists in London had used real tomato soup on a Van Gogh.

What did Campbell's do with its own Warhol soup can?

Hung it in its boardroom in Camden, New Jersey: by then the company counted the artist as an asset, and in 1985 it had hired him to paint its new soup-mix boxes.

What set Richard Pettibone's 1960s copies of Warhol's soup cans apart from the originals?

They were miniatures, some less than a foot high: he had seen the 1962 show fresh out of art school, and went on to shrink Stella and Johns in the same way.